“It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

                                                     ~ Philip K Dick

In Intermate, three women residing inside a vast space habitat in a parallel universe are playing a new reality game. Creating actual mini-universes via quantum manipulation, people choose a destination, then must find all the real players hidden among the simulated humans. Only that will trigger the ecstatic Intermate experience.

Picking a four-player game, the women are perplexed as they gradually realize they are unexpectedly stuck in a universe called Earth. As they search for a missing fourth player a strange but determined Multiverse Repairman stalks them. He is bent on destroying their game and keeping the cosmic order of the Multiverse intact. He awkwardly poses as a fourth player, engineering a dangerous scheme to trick the women, preventing forbidden disruptions in the forces of space and time.

The women, exploiting their euphoric Intermate talents while dealing with the varieties of local people, become separated from each other.

Eventually there is a cataclysmic showdown with the awkward Multiverse Repairman at the edge of a cliff. He is already beginning to short-circuit and destroy the Intermate game, permanently marooning, possibly annihilating, two of the women, along with a NASA official and a young cop. The Repairman is suddenly thrown aside just as the unorthodox, four-player energy field goes beyond maximum, in an extended, super-hyper Intermate.

Almost immediately the foursome of two earthlings and the two women are comfortably and pleasantly inside the plush habitat where they had always lived.

Or so it seems —

Until a kind of real-time quantum flip brings the revelation that they are in a totally new, thrilling universe, where they possess the power and unlimited ability to visit at will any and all of the infinite realities of the Multiverse.

The surprising fate of the Reality Repairman and the third lost woman are then revealed.

And so in homage to P. K Dick, in Intermate, reality is mutable, the universe is not what it seems, and chaos lurks around the corner.  But determined and flexible minds can decode and adapt, even thrive.

As our two heroines, torn from their origins, can now choose freely all possible alternatives, any version of reality in the grand Multiverse.